At the end of the seventeenth century or the beginning of the eighteenth the family settled in the great mercantile port and free city of Danzig on the Baltic, and Heinrich Floris, together with his brother Johann Friedrich, built up the house of Schopenhauer into one of the most stable and reputable in the city. He is described as having a ‘square, muscular frame, broad face with wide mouth and prominent underjaw’ – which might be a description of his son in his later years. When Prussia annexed Danzig in March 1793 as part of the second partition of Poland, the house of Schopenhauer moved out of a city no longer ‘free’ and transferred to Hamburg, where H. F. Schopenhauer conducted business for 12 years without ever becoming naturalized. The hysteria behind the stiff façade of the bourgeois merchant and necessitating it lay close to the surface in Heinrich Floris, and in his last years he developed signs of mental unbalance. In April 1805 he was found lying dead in a canal, apparently having fallen from a granary abutting on to it: his associates and family were in little doubt that he had committed suicide.

This was Arthur Schopenhauer's father. His mother was a very different type of human being. Johanna Henrietta, born Trosiener (1766–1838), was also a Danziger and the daughter of a merchant, but her tastes were totally at variance with those of her world. She had a very easy-going disposition and enjoyed party-going and party-giving; she was also ‘artistic’ in the silly sense and a bit of a culture snob; but on the whole a much more pleasing personality than Heinrich Floris. His death was a release: she wound up the house of Schopenhauer and, together with her daughter Adele (1796–1849), Arthur's only sister, she went to live in Weimar, the capital of German classical literature, where in due course she embarked on a literary career herself and ran a salon at which Goethe and other notables appeared from time to time. She was the author of several novels and achieved a moderate fame of which Arthur, when he too had become an author, was envious. (It was one of the many subjects they quarrelled about. An exchange which has been preserved – Arthur: My book will be available when all your books are completely forgotten. Johanna: Yes, the whole edition will be available.)

When Arthur was born, in Danzig on 22 February 1788, it was to this not very well matched couple and as inheritor of their barely compatible qualities. But his earliest years were very happy: there was always plenty of money and although cared for almost exclusively by his mother, who lived on the Schopenhauer farm at the eastern limit of Danzig territory while his father stayed most of the week in the city itself, he was decidedly his father's son. Heinrich Floris intended, of course, that he should inherit the house of Schopenhauer and he was brought up with that destiny in view. His schooling was sporadic and in 1797, aged nine, he was taken off to Paris and then Le Havre, where he stayed for two years with a French family. In 1799 he came back, not to Danzig but to Hamburg, and for three years attended a private school ‘for the sons of the wealthier classes’. During these years the maternal component of his make-up began to become active and he developed a strong inclination towards literature which at length dominated him and led him to declare his intention of following a literary career when he grew up. It is clear that neither he nor his father had any precise notion of what this meant, but his father did know that at any rate it did not sound compatible with running the house of Schopenhauer as it ought to be run. He therefore offered the boy an alternative: either he could persist in wanting a ‘literary career’, in which case he would have to begin regular studies in Hamburg of literature, Latin and other dull subjects; or he could agree to settle down to a mercantile career, in which case he could leave immediately on a long tour of France and England so as to see something of the world first. Arthur was 15 and he chose the latter alternative. Presumably his father knew he would. They all left for a trip that was to last two years (1803–5), and when they returned to Hamburg in January 1805 Arthur was put into the office of a merchant named Jenisch, as a clerk.

This is now the crucial epoch of his life. In April his father dies: the death leaves him feeling more rather than less bound to fulfil his promise to become a merchant. But the house of Schopenhauer is sold up, his mother and sister leave for Weimar, and he is left in the office of Jenisch. And now despair begins to enter his soul. He hates the work of a clerk, and has now come to hate the whole mercantile world; at the same time his very modest education has fitted him for little else. When he is 21 he will get his share of the paternal fortune, assuming his mother has not spent it by then – but as yet he is only 17, and at 17 four years are an unimaginable eternity.